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Conversion. If you’re a digital marketer, conversion is your bread and butter. But every year it gets tougher to secure them. Audiences have changed an unprecedented amount in just a few short years. Which means marketers must constantly keep up to date with the latest trends and tactics if they’re to continue successfully reaching their audience and converting them into customers.

Which is why we’ve put together an overview of the most important activities digital marketers should be focusing on for conversion success in 2019:

Set goals for your campaign

It might seem like a basic step, but you’d be amazed at how many marketers overlook it! Before you can embark on a digital marketing campaign, you need to know what you’re trying to achieve by doing it. It’s no longer enough to say, “I want to increase conversion”, it’s time to get specific.

Goals keep your campaigns and marketing activities aligned towards achieving a common objective. They help set expectations and act to motivate you and your team. Goals also help you realise what is and isn’t attainable based on the resources you have available.

Knowledge Gaps– To learn a new skill, or how to use a specific function in a tool.

Understand what purpose your website serves to users and use that as the central point for developing your goals going forward towards better conversion.

Use analytics to keep an eye on key metrics

Setting your goals is one thing, but you also must be able to effectively track the progress of those goals. The easiest way to do this is by keeping a close eye on some essential KPIs.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are key metrics that help your business understand where your successes are coming from. They also help you determine what changes you need to make to build your customer base and generate more revenue.

Take a mobile-first approach to SEO

Throughout 2018, Google has been slowly shifting from desktop-first indexing (the traditional model) to mobile-first indexing – a shift which may impact how your eCommerce site ranks on Google if your website is not properly optimised for mobile.

Ensure that content currently featured on your desktop site matches the content featured on your mobile site. Using responsive design should help you do this automatically.

Improve your mobile page load speed. Use Google’s dedicated PageSpeed Insights tool to see how well pages of your site perform and benefit from some performance optimisation suggestions straight from the horse’s mouth.

While you should try to increase the number of good quality inbound links to your site, it’s also very important (and a lot easier!) to develop a good internal linking strategy.

Make it easy for users to convert on mobile. Add Google Autofill to any existing forms on your site to help pre-fill fields for Chrome users and consider adding a tel:schema to enable mobile users to click and call a phone number directly from your site.

Experiment with new content that’s useful to potential customers

‘Content is king’ has long been the mantra of digital marketers everywhere, but it continues to ring true. In fact, it’s still the best way to grow your audience organically.

If you’ve had a blog for a few years, it’s a great time to do a bit of an audit and remove any now-irrelevant posts with old information or breath new life into tired blogs by injecting new stats and insights.

But content doesn’t always have to equal a blog. There are so many blogs already out there, that making blog content stand out is becoming increasingly difficult. Shake things up in 2019 by experimenting with different types of content. Podcasts, videos, interactive content, or partnering with influencers can help you supplement the blog content you have now and may even help you to reach a new audience. Experimenting with different types of content will also allow you to get a better idea of what your customers like. Sure, some content might fall flat, but some may perform even better than your written content ever did. Seeing what works will help you to better understand your audience and continue to refine your efforts based on what works for them.

Do a social media audit

If you’ve been in the game for a while now, you’ll probably remember when and why you decided to start each of your brand’s social media channels (usually because your boss insisted “we need to have a presence on Instagram/Facebook/Google+/LinkedIn/Twitter/Snapchat)”!). But as we’ve all become used to social media and the benefits associated with each particular channel, it’s gradually become clear that some channels serve our brand far better than others. Which is why 2019 should be the year of the social media cull.

It’s time to get ride of the social media accounts that are no longer relevant to your brand. Check out this blog (an oldie but a goodie), to determine which social media platforms your brand should focus on.

When you decide which ones to keep, be sure to keep them updated. In general, this is how often you should aim to update your followers (Note: depending on your specific industry this could be more or less):

Facebook: 1 update per business day

Twitter: 2-3 tweets per business day

Instagram: 1-2 post per week

LinkedIn: 1 post per week

Take another look at your user sign-up forms

Speaking of audits…Whether you use them to build your email subscriber list, gather leads with an eBook download, or require users to fill one out to create an account, it’s time you took a good look at every form housed on your website. According to SEO-Hacker.com, you can lose a whopping 86% of customers through registration forms.

To generate maximum sign-ups, you must minimise the steps involved in filling in your forms. A name and an email address is generally the only information you need from a potential consumer. However, if you really do need more information to register a new user (some sign-ups require on-the-spot payment that requires information like a billing address and a credit card number), consider breaking the registration process down into multiple steps. Multi-page forms make converting less overwhelming by separating the process into several short steps. More pages equals more space for bigger fonts, longer fields, and descriptive labels that might not fit on a shorter form.

Start using ‘Where to Buy’ technology

This is a crucial element to focus on this year to drive conversions!

Instead of just hoping customers remember your marketing efforts, did you know you can actively channel engaged customers directly to purchasing options? Where to Buy technology makes it simple and easy for customers to purchase your products from a variety of different retailers, from any digital channel.

How does it do this? Well, Where to Buy (WTB) technology highlights the price and availability of your products across a selection of retail partners (both on and offline), enabling consumers to complete their purchase with their preferred retailer in a few clicks – meaning you don’t miss out on a sale. WTB technology can be added to further enhance several aspects of your current marketing activities, including:

Social media – WTB increases the impact of your social media channels on your bottom line.

It’s also omni-channel compatible and cross-device enabled.The best part is, it comes with access to real-time marketing and sales performance insights. Thus reducing your reliance on third-party retailers to provide sales data.

Users of WTB technology have seen an average 10-20% increase in conversion rates, 30% increase in consumers’ basket size, and 20x increase in repeat sales.

All in all

While it may be getting tougher to convert consumers in 2019, there are still plenty of actions you can take to ensure your brand stands out from the rest! Learn more about how global brands are utilising Where To Buy technology to offer consumers more choice in their path to purchase, resulting in increased DTC and retailer store conversion.

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About us

ChannelSight makes the world instantly shoppable and enables brands to grow online and offline sales. Our Where to Buy technology integrates with content across all digital channels helping customers jump straight to an approved retail partner to complete their purchase instantly. ChannelSight engineers a fast, frictionless buying journey for customers while giving you actionable marketing intelligence.